Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Milosevic was the victim of war propaganda that today runs like a torrent across our screens and newspapers and beckons great danger for us all. He was the prototype demon, vilified by the western media as the "butcher of the Balkans" who was responsible for "genocide", especially in the secessionist Yugoslav province of Kosovo. Prime Minister Tony Blair said so, invoked the Holocaust and demanded action against "this new Hitler". David Scheffer, the US ambassador-at-large for war crimes [sic], declared that as many as "225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59" may have been murdered by Milosevic's forces.

This was the justification for Nato's bombing, led by Bill Clinton and Blair, that killed hundreds of civilians in hospitals, schools, churches, parks and television studios and destroyed Serbia's economic infrastructure. It was blatantly ideological; at a notorious "peace conference" in Rambouillet in France, Milosevic was confronted by Madeleine Albright, the US secretary of state, who was to achieve infamy with her remark that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children were "worth it"

Saturday, October 22, 2016

the US unwittingly played into Soviet propaganda that the US was really no different than the Nazis themselves.

In addition, as Simpson make very clear, much of what these former Nazis fed the OSS and CIA as information on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe turned out to be baseless, and in many cases their spy networks turned out to have been deeply compromised by the USSR. The spy networks consistently overestimated the actual military threat posed by the USSR. But as Simpson points out, these CIA paid assets had ever incentive to overstate the danger. They were on the payroll, and as long as the Soviet menace appeared imminent, they would remain so. But start to say that there was no threat and the gravy train might come to an abrupt halt. Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, anyone?

Finally, because they fed the CIA, which admittedly had few Company assets on the ground in Eastern Europe after the war, a steadily hawkish line about the USSR and its intentions, they helped to contribute to the shrill political hysteria that emerged. I don't want to be misunderstood: the Soviet Union was evil, its methods vile and I don't weep any tears for its demise. But in our fear and in our ignorance, we made serious policy errors in those post-war years, and in doing so, we relied to a significant degree on people we should have known better than to trust: a group of ex-Nazis and collaborators who we knew were guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Further, as I have suggested here, we helped inculcate our national security apparatus with a view that the ends always justified the means, and that as intelligence gatekeepers, the CIA was not bound by US law or public policy, but merely by its own secret determination of what was in the country's best interests.

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

"The rest of this article argues that the most serious threat to development of a liberal world order is the way in which liberal states have decided to wage the War on Terror and the different contradictions of the idea of a liberal world order. The article argues that the way in which liberal states, spearheaded by the US, have waged the War on Terror is a greater threat to a liberal world order than the threat from transnational and global Jihadists and terrorists."..."It is true that the US President, Barack Obama, and the former British Prime Minister, David Cameron, stopped referring to the war against the Sunni Muslim Jihad network as the War on Terror, but despite this, not least Obama has actually intensified the war considerably during his term of office."